The Branded and Gilded Life

He's known as 'Lipstick Brother' in China In a pandemic, Li Jiaqi, sold $1.9 billion in goods on the first day of Alibaba’s annual shopping festival in August 2020 He tries on various makeup products on his show, ranging from brands from top companies including Sheshiedo Co lotions and Apple Air pods - though there's no make up connection there! It's not as if he has an unusual format.  The sales...

Or Korean, for that matter. Or even Russian. The evolution of subtitles and dubbing in films is going in unpredictable directions. Streaming services are running into problems with respect to dubbing and generating subtitles in multiple languages. One runaway hit can change equations. The Squid Game on Netflix was watched worldwide by audiences who didn't know a word of Korean. But Netflix found a...

It started off as a way of getting paralyzed people to walk. Now, it has evolved into military, healthcare and industrial solutions. The basic idea is to enhance human capacity for walking, carrying weights or doing repetitive tasks. The Exoskeleton will probably transform more industries in future than robotics alone. The number of applications being simultaneously worked on is staggering. Helpin...

The tweet set off a firestorm. Imagine printers not being able to recognise a company's cartridges! We have all grown used to the cat and mouse games that printer manufacturers play. Replace all the four-color cartridges even though only one of them is drained. Having to waste expensive toners because all the cartridges don't get empty at the same time. Users try and find workarounds or cheaper so...

Chatbots have to simulate human conversations. And we think they're free flowing, the way dialogue is delivered in movies. In real life, they are halting, awkward and filled with long pauses. Even between friends and colleagues, conversations dry up after the common subjects are exhausted or one of the people conversing loses interest. There's a lot of 'ummm..', eh.....' and clearing of throats, a...

His name is Nasir Ahmed and it won't ring a bell. But hang on a minute because it will all make sense. He went from Bangalore to the US in the early 60s for higher studies and for his PhD, he came up with the Discrete Cosine Transform - an algorithm that would prove to be crucial to the future of the world. It compressed images and later was applied to video compression as well. The major use at t...

Imagine eye drops that improve eyesight. It's the decision most people confront late into their 30s or early 40s Probably the first sign is when distant objects look clear and one has to hold books a little further away to focus. Then comes the hard part. Mentally admitting that one needs reading glasses. The first time is self-conscious. The emphasis on telling people 'I only need it for reading'...

User manuals are dry and factual. They tell you how to use a product but never how the experience can be enjoyable. But we need user manuals because that's where user experiences begin. Take a simple thing like getting the best out of your fridge. The user manual tells you how to make ice, what different compartments are for and how to maintain the fridge. But a personal user experience of fridges...

Or teacup, for that matter? Some people prize massive mugs that hold large amounts of coffee and nurse it for hours. So, why do we slip into these habits? Why do we want to repeat the familiar? There's an aspect of selecting cups that we're hardly conscious about. The mouth comes in contact with the rim and unconsciously drives our preferences when we make a choice. The fancy ceramic designs with...

There was a camera called Flip before smartphones in the early 2000s It did just one thing well - video and made it easy for just about anyone to make and edit video.  As it soared in popularity, it was bought by Cisco for almost $600 million. It proved to be a purchase fraught with problems. Cisco was geared to sell to enterprises and Flip was essentially a consumer product. Somewhere within the...

Imagine you could. Your smartphone would instantly become a glass brick, assuming it could travel through time. So, unless you had some way to stay connected to the present, there would be no coming back.  Even if you went back 20 years, you would not have the smartphone or social media. Now that's an idea worth thinking about, given that we know how polarised the world has become. Go back over 10...

First, you get keyless entry. Then, if you lose the fob, you pay a huge amount to reprogram it, even though the work involved is minimal. However, Toyota has demonstrated that car companies can figure out new sources of revenue on a car you've already paid for. There are a range of 'Connected Services' you opt for and it's only after a couple of years that you realise that it costs you money to en...

That's how all fairy tales’ end.  And the real world begins. We assume that the attainment of success or money is some point from which we can leap into a higher level of existence. Question is, we still have to find it. Life seems pretty much the same for billionaires as it does for us regular folk. Just yesterday, someone sent a WhatsApp on Jeff Bezos where he said, in a mundane detail, that he...

If you've downloaded the VLC media player on your desktop, you know how well it works. The CEO started off the project in 2003 when he was a student at Ecole Central in Paris. It ran on the university servers for a few years before it became wildly popular and outgrew the initial infrastructure. Since 2005, it has been downloaded more than 3 billion times. And it still available for free. Jean-Bap...

The profile pic is a signal - whether it is on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. A tiny amount of pixel space where the site allows limited exploration. A newbie is instantly recognizable - the ones who have the standard issue avatar of the site. It could also signal the rebel who does not wish to play the game. But that's often the exception rather than the rule. Around profile pics, ther...

Literally. A new way of drying off after a bath is here. Unlike wrapping yourself in layers of Turkish bath towels, turn on the air. A new design appliance for bathrooms is the all-body dryer. As opposed to the hand dryers that have become reasonably popular in public bathrooms. The advantages are obvious. Go from wet to dry in a matter of minutes.  After luxuriating in a hot shower, hot blasts of...

The QR code was invented back in 1994. The original use was to scan components at high speeds in auto manufacturing companies. The biggest advantage of QR codes is that they hold 300 times more data than barcodes But they became a largely fruitless link between offline and online environments. Brands used it for years to tempt users to go online by scanning a squiggly square in magazine ads after...

James Dyson built over 5000 prototypes of the 'Cyclone' vacuum cleaner to get it right. He made one change at a time, so he knew exactly what was going wrong or in the right direction. Not 2 or 3 changes. One. He was told by every manufacturer that vacuum cleaners could not get any more efficient. The 'cyclone' technology had to be developed to suck up dust particles smaller than 1 micron. A Physi...

There's something cinematic about platforms - no, not the software version. It's where family issues get resolved or break up forever - at least in the movies. The place where strangers arrive in a town and have a profound impact - where their life changes or the town changes. Scriptwriters need a staging point for life's inflection points - and railway platforms are more accessible than airports....

Formula 1 is all about speed with a core group of worshippers. But it was a closed world. What people saw was cars driven at incredible speeds around convoluted tracks. The big names like Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen were well-known. But a sport is never about the lead players alone. It's about the thousands of smaller stories that never get a moment in the spotlight. So anyone placed below the T...

We've all seen the grainy footage from newsreels long ago. Everyone looks as if they're starring in a Charlie Chaplin film comically moving at a fast trot. Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy turned his attention to real life events a few years ago. In 2018, he released a documentary edited from over 100 hours of footage of the first world war from the Imperial War Archive...

This will remain one of those hard to decipher phenomena. While India's UPI has recently crossed $100 billion in digital transactions a month, the amount of banknotes in circulation in India has reached an all-time high as well. This from the DNA newspaper: RBI data revealed that the currency amount with the public stood at a record high of Rs 28.30 lakh crores for the fortnight ending October 8,...

We remember school days with nostalgia. But we also remember those days for another reason - time seemed to move so much more slowly. Each period in class stretched like it would never end, especially the ones with teachers who made subjects a dreary bore. We envied adults who had independence and they went about their day as they pleased - even if we never quite understood why they seemed harried...

Anyone who has worked on images knows the titan - Adobe Photoshop Used by experts, pranksters and hobbyists, Photoshop gives you immense control. You can darken or lighten complexions, change backgrounds, introduce fresh objects and do much more. The photo 'retouching' that used to happen in studios decades ago had skilled artists physically restore old prints and faded photographs.  Studio artist...

We first experienced it at the hostel. Bored with the predictable fare served every day, we would escape at least 3-4 times a week to the little shack beyond the gates.  The omelets dripped in oil and were sandwiched between two crusty slices of toast. Yet, we'd wolf it down and be back for more. The shack was owned by Guru and he taught us how business could be run with a customer base of mostly...